Since I got shut out of the Walter Reade's 1994 screening of LES AMANTS
DU PONT-NEUF, which Miramax has retitled THE LOVERS ON THE BRIDGE for American
consumption, and had to catch up with it on a bootleg video a few months
later, the chance to finally see it in on the big screen in commercial
release feels like a victory. In the eight years since LOVERS was made,
it's acquired a cult reputation in the U.S. through one-off festival screenings
and sub rosa video circulation. (Bootlegs of Carax's second film,
MAUVAIS SANG, are also available from mail-order sources and several New
York video stores.) For once, we can't lay this delay entirely at the feet
of cowardly American distributors. At the time of its release, LOVERS was
one of the most expensive films ever produced in France, but it turned
out to be a commercial disaster. Carax had to wait 8 years to make another
film; his latest, POLA X, premiered at Cannes last month to a negative
reception. Consequently, the producers of LOVERS tried to recoup some of
their losses by charging an enormous sum (at least a million dollars, if
the rumors are true) for the American rights. By the time Miramax sprung
for it last year, one assumes the sales agents had significantly reduced
their demands. If a smaller distributor had acquired it, we wouldn't have
had to wait a year for its release, but the Miramachine ocassionally deserves
its due. As much as I (and most American cinephiles I know) like to criticize
Miramax, they once performed a valuable service by introducing American
audiences to Pedro Almodovar, Peter Greenaway and Krzysztof Kieslowski,
but when Kieslowski passed away, this auteurist inclination went with him.
They've subsequently treated filmmakers as major as Jim Jarmusch, Wong
Kar-wai, Takeshi Kitano and Abbas Kiarostami as if they're not fit to kiss
the shoes of the sublime Gwynneth Paltrow. Let's hope they don't fumble
the ball for Carax.

Alex (Denis Lavant), a vagrant street performer and fire-breather, makes
his "home" on the Pont-Neuf, a decrepit bridge closed to the
public for 2 years of repair. He lives there along with Hans (Klaus-Michael
Grüber), a middle-aged German who gives him drugs, but one day Michele
(Juliette Binoche), a painter from a middle-class background who's gradually
going blind, turns up. Although Hans resists her presence, insisting that
women don't belong on the bridge, Alex and Michele gradually fall in love.

In some respects, it's fitting that I first saw THE LOVERS ON THE BRIDGE
on video. While Jean-Yves Escoffier's gorgeous cinematography doesn't survive
on video - especially since a PAL-to-NTSC transfer tends to blur bright
colors - Carax's breathtaking set pieces suit the format's possibility
for fetishizing fragments of a film. (An acquaintance found it very easy
to condense clips from LOVERS and MAUVAIS SANG into a twenty-minute assemblage
for his cable show.) Rather than a conventional love story, it's an intensely
physical evocation of great passion. While Alex and Michele spend
many of their happiest moments dancing or water-skiing, Carax's camera
is the most agile dancer here. His centerpiece, an ecstatic 20-minute Bastille
Day celebration, is as exciting as any musical number or action scene I've
ever seen, and I think it would have every bit as much impact out of context.

Even so, I disagree with those critics who've praised that sequence
while complaining that the rest of the film never quite gels. In Europe,
Carax has often been grouped together with Luc Besson and Jean-Jacques
Beneix as an avatarof the cinema du look, a flashy but hollow style
inspired by TV commercials and music videos. (His reputation in the U.S.
may actually have benefited from the fact that we've usually wound up seeing
his films far outside the period and context in which they were made.)
That ghettoization might ring true if LOVERS filled the space between peak
moments with wall-to-wall music, action and attitude - check out RUN LOLA
RUN, which really does feel like a 90-minute music video, for an
example of the cinema du look at its emptiest - but Carax's masterful
rhythmic and tonal shifts - his non-naturalist use of sound and editing
are particularly impressive - raises it above the painfully hip posturing
of films like DIVA & SUBWAY. Its world is full of joy and melancholy.

Robert Bresson used the real Pont-Neuf as a setting for FOUR NIGHTS
OF A DREAMER, but Carax reconstructed the bridge and its surroundings on
an enormous set - quite convincingly beaten and weathered - in the South
of France. This vantage point isolates Alex, Hans and Michele, but it sometimes
offers the couple a privileged perspective on the city. The Bastille Day
fireworks show - accompanied by a loud, eclectic range of music from passing
radios - seems like a private party held for their benefit. (Sparks even
land all over the bridge!) The first 20 minutes of THE LOVERS ON THE BRIDGE
suggest a neo-realist film about the homeless; its plot kicks into first
gear when Alex takes refuge in a shelter after a car runs over his foot.
Carax doesn't evade the squalor of Alex and Michele's lives or the misery
around them, but he also suggests that urban life can offer magical possibilities,
a vision that couldn't be further from Rudolph Giuliani's Disneyfied Manhattan.

Far from a gratuitous indulgence, the Bastille Day sequence represents
Michele's desperate sensory indulgence in the face of complete blindness.
This film's mad urgency - John Powers has described it as "too-muchness"
- stems from her desire to cram in experience as fast as she can. There's
a particularly haunting moment in which she lays down on the sidewalk alongside
a crowded disco's narrow window, trying to vicariously absorb the dancers'
vitality. Almost every critic who's written about THE LOVERS ON THE BRIDGE
has commented on its romanticism, but Carax is quite willing to show that
passion can also bring out cruelty, selfishness and violence. Alex is quite
comfortable with Michele's loss of sight, largely because it will make
her more dependent on him and possibly because he feels threatened by her
skill as a visual artist. After she drugs and robs café patrons,
walking off with 2,000 francs, Alex tricks her into throwing the money
into the Seine, and he later goes to great lengths to prevent her from
hearing about an operation that could restore her sight. Although Carax
exalts l'amour fou, he certainly doesn't idealize it.

In THE LOVERS ON THE BRIDGE, postmodernist irreverence with the limits
of style and realism works hand-in-hand with genuine character development
and emotional force. The stakes of Alex and Michele's relationship have
real - and quite moving - consequences. Consciously or not, subsequent
mannerist films like Wong Kar-wai's CHUNG KING EXPRESS & FALLEN ANGELS
and Olivier Assayas' IRMA VEP & COLD WATER are kissing cousins to Carax.
(As Gavin Smith pointed out in 1994, even Uma Thurman's dance to "Girl,
You'll Be A Woman Soon" in PULP FICTION could be a Carax moment.)
Real news travels slowly, even in the age of global communication, but
at last this glorious "folly" has arrived on our shores.